Category: Contract Lifecycle Management

Corporate Legal Market Trends for August 2021

Posted on August 5, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Digital Transformation

Welcome to the August edition of our monthly look into corporate legal market trends. In this edition, we share some thought-provoking articles covering innovative GCs, the digital transformation of BT’s legal operations and how AI and contract lifecycle management help legal departments run like a business. We hope you find some practical takeaways in the following articles.

1. Examples of Operational Excellence from Legal Teams Running the Department like a Business

Running corporate in-house legal departments like a business is quickly gaining traction in legal departments around the globe. The age-old complaint that lawyers are holding up critical processes is rapidly turning into a thing of the past. Technology solutions have significantly contributed to alleviating this problem, providing faster processes and newfound collaborative abilities at unforeseen levels. Of particular note: Lenovo’s contract management transformation, which happened thanks to a strong vision and the adoption of contract lifecycle management technology and AI.

According to the article:

Lenovo has recently digitised its contracting processes and is now able to measure how much time is spent on a contract, how many lawyers worked on it, and how much a template has been modified. “Data analytics has enabled insights we never had before,” says [Marcelo] Peviani [legal director at the centre of excellence for Lenovo].

Source: Financial Times

2. The Next Legal Market Trend to Put on Your Radar: Running the Post-Award Phase of Contract Management

According to a World Commerce & Contracting Association and Deloitte survey, contract professionals are shifting their focus to the post-signature phase of contract management. The results show a growing emphasis on the post-award stage of contract management. According to the survey, “less than 30% of organizations currently have centralized or center-led post-award contract management resources” and “only a little over 20% attempt to monitor or calculate the costs or overall benefits associated with contract management.” It also discovered that nearly 40% of the participants are looking to improve post-award processes, and more than one-third are striving to introduce more “robust approaches to obligation management.”

Source: World Commerce & Contracting Association

3. Hear BT Discuss Its Award-Winning Legal Operations Digital Transformation  

David Griffin, head of legal technology and change at BT, joined the Onit podcast recently to discuss his company’s award-winning legal operations transformation. He shared how the company led legal market trends by replacing manual and disconnected process and management tools. The change helped the department handle workload and matters across the teams from inception to closure.

Judges for the Legal Innovation Awards took note, sharing with Law.com that BT stood out “not only due to the speed of their roll-out of the platform but by taking an existing process and migrating it into a streamlined, efficient platform.”

BT won the Legal Innovation Award for “Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations” and was named a finalist for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards. You can hear David’s story here.

Source: Onit

4. Thinking outside of the Box Reaches New Level among In-House Lawyers

The Financial Times has featured 20 highly experienced GCs who are directly challenging traditional legal roles. By redefining themselves as strategic thinkers, they are making market-leading headway when it comes to sustainability and digital transformation. Companies are now operating in ways that require lawyers to use their skills and experience in new ways. The continuing proliferation of implementing legal technology gives these lawyers more time to focus on high-impact legal work.

Source: Financial Times

5. AI and Contract Lifecycle Management: What Should You Expect?

If you’re following legal market trends, you’ve probably already heard how contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management. But now that AI is in the mix, how does that affect contract lifecycle management? A new visual guide tackles this topic to get you up to speed in no time. It explores questions such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Source: Onit resources

Bonus Resources: The Latest on CLM and AI

Year after year, legal market trends have pointed to lawyers and legal departments finding ways to be more efficient while controlling costs. Adopting cutting-edge technology, thinking outside of the box and running the department like a business are important ways to achieve these objectives.

Combining contract lifecycle management tools with AI is a prime example of working toward those means. When paired, they offer streamlined processes, a decrease in friction for employees across the enterprise and deliver more business value. If you’d like to learn more about legal market trends for contract lifecycle management tools, check out some of our recent blog posts:

CLM Process Flow: Making Contracting Easier for Legal

Posted on July 27, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

The contract lifecycle management (CLM) process flow challenges many corporate legal departments. While contracts play a critical role in the success of any business, getting them to execution can be an uphill battle, thanks to antiquated processes and outdated tools. Popular software like Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and SharePoint doesn’t offer the transparency you need during drafting, review and approval to keep contracting processes moving forward in a timely manner.

That’s where contract lifecycle management (CLM) software comes in. Managing your contracting doesn’t have to be overwhelming. The right contracting tools create a CLM process flow that allows corporate legal departments to eliminate delays, keep relationships with suppliers, vendors and customers running smoothly and gain insight into the contracting process to help with risk management and compliance.

Eliminating Contracting Bottlenecks In the CLM Process Flow

When the legal department is responsible for drafting, reviewing and approving even the most routine agreements, bottlenecks inevitably happen. Without a proper system for keeping track of contract volume and status, legal will inevitably be overwhelmed by contract requests from other departments, causing a backlog and frustration that will reverberate throughout the organization.

With the right CLM process flow, however, you speed up the creation and review process and free your lawyers to focus on high-value matters rather than administrative tasks. CLM software can remove delays in all stages of the contracting process, including creating intake forms configured to specific contract types, using data from those forms to automate the contract assembly process via templates, tailoring workflows to a contract’s subject matter, prioritizing contracts for review based on risk and more.

Gaining Transparency Into Review and Approvals

In the past, contract review occurred via inefficient emails between all the various stakeholders, making the approval process unclear and leaving contracts stagnating in inboxes for far too long. A better collaboration tool is necessary for legal to properly coordinate with procurement, sales and other departments, regardless of location or contract complexity.

Cloud-based CLM that’s designed and implemented to meet the needs of a specific organization can allow all parties in the approval chain to access the current status of contracting no matter where they are. More sophisticated CLM systems can create parallel approval processes incorporating e-signatures, eliminating hard copies and significantly accelerating the contracting timeline.

When you add AI to the CLM process flow, it accelerates it even more. Contract AI lets business users can run an AI-powered redline in less than two minutes. It can also identify potential issues and then automatically escalate critical issues to legal as necessary. The AI redlining essentially allows business users to self-service the review of common contracts such as NDAs.

Keeping Track of Executed Contracts

Many organizations lack a centralized contract repository, meaning that contracts are typically tucked away after being signed, too often in a place where they’re difficult to find again when they’re needed. Hard-copy storage and scattered electronic filing cabinets create disorganization, which in turn creates the risk of missing important dates or necessary compliance updates.

Having a single, designated repository for all contracts as part of your CLM process flow eliminates these problems. Contracts are simple to find, even after those who were originally involved with them have moved on. The right repository will be searchable across all document formats, so less time is spent trying to find contracts and more time is spent focusing on high-value work.

A CLM Process Flow that Stays on Top of Compliance

Compliance is critical to minimizing organizational risk. That means complying both with legal and regulatory requirements and complying with the terms of your contracts themselves. The best way to ensure compliance on all fronts is to implement CLM tools that track the terms of all your contracts, including conditions and pertinent dates, rather than leaving that task open to manual processes and costly human error.

CLM software with AI can extract the necessary data to have a clear picture of all your obligations and relevant legal standards. It can also track all changes to contracts and generate reports to create a reliable audit trail to lower your risk. For example, the contract AI can identify which contracts need repapering due to regulatory, policy or commercial changes and extract data from multiple legal documents at once for due diligence, applying contract updates or importing legacy contracts.

To capitalize on all these benefits of CLM process flow, you need a CLM solution that’s flexible enough to work the way your department works and can meet the needs of your entire organization, not just legal. Onit CLM is the simple, flexible, agile solution you need to stay on top of your contracting and boost your efficiency.

Contact Onit today to schedule a demo or email [email protected] to learn more.

Getting Started with Legal Contract Management Software and AI

Posted on July 20, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Legal contract management software can drastically streamline contract creation, review, execution and management – processes that are often fraught with complications and errors.

Data from the World Commerce & Contracting Association supports this idea. The organization recently surveyed its 70,000+ members about their contract challenges and priorities and found that 85% experience pressure for contract simplification. Another 81% said they have plans to implement contract automation. These points speak to the fact that poorly managed contracts lead to lost revenue, higher costs and more time devoted to manual tasks for all parties involved.

The Challenges of Contract Management

To understand the actual value of legal contract management software, it’s helpful to recap the inefficiencies associated with contract handling.

Manual processes open the door for errors and slow down overall contract execution. For example, approvals and negotiations done via email are often sluggish or overlooked. Untracked revisions can lead to confusion, conflict or non-compliance and a lack of standard legal language may result in lengthy review times or require lawyers to get involved.

Disparate repositories result in inefficient reporting and reduce contract visibility. Contracts spread out over different repositories, departments and geographical locations make monitoring corporate contracts holistically almost impossible. Without tracking expiring contracts and renewals, companies run the risk of compliance exposure as well as revenue loss.

Changes occur over the lifetime of a contract, including renewal dates, pricing, emerging legal requirements and other events. They require amendments and approvals from the contract parties. If these changes aren’t managed, implemented  and communicated correctly and quickly, organizations can increase compliance risks for themselves and all parties involved.

How Legal Contract Management Software Helps

Legal contract management software can reduce the average hours spent on contracts by 20%, accelerate review and save on costs. It does this by:

  • Automating the contract lifecycle and maximizing speed and control. Workflows can be configured and automated to support how your company interacts with the contract lifecycle. Clause libraries in CLM automatically create new and approved contract language quickly, and pre-approved templates dramatically reduce creation time. Additionally, contracts can be delivered to all appropriate parties from the CLM solution and integrate with e-signature capabilities to maximize contract execution.
  • Centralizing contracts in one repository in the cloud. This makes them easier to find for appropriate parties and provides a real-time configurable dashboard that shows business-critical contract information at a glance. The legal contract management software also applies the proper metadata when a new contract is created or captured to ensure tracking and sends alerts to notify parties of key events, obligations, milestones and expiration and renewal dates.
  • Allowing lawyers to work where they’re comfortable working. In this case that means enabling them to manage contract changes with a Microsoft Word Add-In. They can receive contracts in a Word doc format with change-tracking locked, save the contract directly into the CLM solution and leave remarks while checking it back in.

CLM + AI: What Is the AI Difference?

CLM centralizes contract storage and automates the request, creation, negotiation, execution and management of any type of contract.

When you combine AI with CLM, you can lower the number of contracts needing to be reviewed. This gives the reviewer the ability to speed up a review and provide consistency across processes. AI also significantly enhances contract management after execution by extracting and obtaining usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts.

AI and Legal Contract Management Software: What to Look For and How to Get Started

Not all CLM AI is created the same. To get the full benefits of contract lifecycle management solutions, you should carefully evaluate AI for both the pre- and post-signature phases of contract management.

If you’re not sure what to look for in an AI-powered CLM solution, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve prepared a Quick Start Guide that highlights the ideal legal contract AI features you need if you want to reduce inefficiencies, errors and time spent on contracts without sacrificing compliance or visibility. It also provides valuable expert tips to help you get started.

The guide includes information such as:

  • Should you look for pre-trained AI?
  • What redlining capabilities should contract AI offer?
  • Can AI offer interactive checklists to accelerate review?
  • How can AI repaper contracts for regulatory, policy and commercial changes?
  • Can AI help you analyze legacy contract data for better contract management?

Download the guide today to discover how AI can enhance your legal contract management software, what to look for and how you can get started quickly.

5,500+ Ways Corporate Legal Innovates Business Process Automation

Posted on July 13, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Business process automation solves a crucial challenge for corporate legal departments. Tasked with doing more with fewer resources, in-house counsel are happily exchanging highly manual processes for Apps and automation.

For example, consider a typical trademark renewal process. An App can reinvent that process, bypassing spreadsheets and emails, automating communications and reminders and helping stakeholders quickly and efficiently determine which trademarks to renew. (You can see a demo here.) The result: Fewer touchpoints for in-house counsel without comprising the integrity and results of the process.

Inspiration for Business Process Automation with the Onit App Catalog

The trademark renewal App is just one example of business process automation innovation from the Onit Nation – the customers, partners and employees building on Onit Apptitude every day. After a decade in existence, Onit currently supports 5,500+ Apps that streamline critical processes like tracking vendor and law firm diversity, managing whistleblower allegations and supporting career development.

Today, we launched our new Onit App Catalog, which shares some of these Apps targeting business process automation in the following areas:

The catalog shares some of the most intriguing solutions and Apps created around the globe. These Apps are trusted by 400+ companies, from privately owned entities to Fortune 50 corporations.

Now, you can search the catalog and find inspiration in the powerful workflows in-house colleagues have built to run within enterprises of all sizes and specialties.

Examples of App Excellence from Corporate Legal Departments

The catalog represents a decade of business process automation innovation that has created digital transformation, one App at a time. Examples of Apps built by and for corporate legal departments include:

  • The vendor and law firm diversity tracking App, which helps internal teams gather diversity statistics from law firms and vendors to track and manage compliance with corporate policies and diversity goals.
  • The whistleblower App, which provides an anonymous intake of any alleged activities brought in by employees. It organizes, assesses and manages whistleblower allegations in a secure, centralized and workflow-driven solution.
  • The trade secrets access management App, which maintains accurate records of who has access to trade secrets or components of trade secrets within an organization. It streamlines the process of securing them upon an employee’s departure.
  • The mentorship and career development App, which creates a more formal method of linking mentors to mentees and tracks opportunities for career development, both inside and outside of an employee’s current role within an organization.

Platforms Make It All Possible

Onit is the only company to offer its users two platforms, combining the power of process and workflow automation with artificial intelligence. Apptitude is Onit’s business process automation platform, where users can easily create, modify and deploy Apps. Because it’s a no-code environment, you can quickly build without technical training to develop Apps for your organization. And unlimited licensing ensures that everyone in the company, regardless of which department they work in, can access the Apps they need to get work done efficiently.

Precedent, our AI platform, complements Apptitude and allows legal and business departments to automate processes faster while making them more cost-effective and efficient. Precedent is 100x faster than other AI systems and enables users to recognize a 40% increase in productivity.

Register for the Onit App Catalog Webinar on July 28

Onit will host a webinar on July 28 at 12 p.m. ET titled “Drive Legal Innovation One App at a Time.” The webinar will provide an overview of the new App Catalog and demonstrate examples of customer Apps for workflow, process and automation across the enterprise. Registration is available here.

Over 5,500 Business Process Automation Apps and Counting

This impressive collection of workflow, process and automation Apps from corporate legal can help enterprises of all sizes attain operational efficiencies, reduce risk and gain greater insight into data and operations. Read the App Catalog to find inspiration for new ways to continue your corporate legal department’s digital transformation journey.

To start with Apps on Onit’s no-code Apptitude platform, request a demonstration or email [email protected] today.

The Latest in Corporate Legal and Legal Operations News (July Edition)

Posted on July 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Welcome to Onit’s July compilation of some of the most pertinent and timely articles for corporate legal and legal operations news.

In this month’s digest, we explore corporate legal departments as profit centers, CLM ROI, the latest ACC benchmarking survey results, how to build a more resilient legal department and an approach to evaluate and control legal spend.

1. Are Corporate Legal Departments the Next Profit Centers?

Is litigation the next big revenue generator for companies? According to a study by a finance firm, companies with inadequate affirmative recovery programs are 27% more likely to leave money on the table. Meanwhile, 73% of CFOs say they have adequate programs to capture value through affirmative litigation, but 46% responded that they needed improvement.

According to the report:

“The research suggests that companies are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how they approach legal assets and that financial officers understand their value and have new opportunities to unlock them.”

As a result, we may see more corporate legal departments shifting some focus from managing risks and controlling costs to collaborating more closely with CFOs.

(source: Legaltech News and Burford)

2. Finding ROI for CLM

The latest legal tech darling – for a good reason – is contract lifecycle management (CLM). If you’re up-to-date on legal operations news, you’re probably all too familiar with the technology. Contract management is an area ripe for digital transformation.

Yet, the buzz around CLM is sometimes more hype than substance – especially when you consider CLM ROI. In this podcast, Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses how to get a CLM solution from hype to payoff and an innovative approach to CLM technology with all the rewards and none of the risks.

(source: Onit blog)

3. One in Four Corporate Legal Departments Are Dedicating Spend to Contract Management Technology (and Other ACC Survey Insights)

Speaking of CLM technology and its popularity, you might not be surprised to find out that the top legal tech area by allocated spend is contract management solutions. This is according to the 2021 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report. Rounding out the top five are compliance, legal research services, IP management and matter management.

The survey includes responses from 493 legal departments in organizations across 24 industries and 40 countries.

Other interesting findings from a legal operations news perspective include:

  • The mean legal department composition is 66% lawyers, 12% paralegals, 6% legal operations professionals and 8% admin/secretarial staff.
  • The median total legal spend for companies is $1.2M for small companies, $8.4M for mid-sized companies and $64M for large companies.
  • 77% of the participants have a list of preferred law firms, ALSPs and other legal service providers. In 2020, they worked with 36 law firms and two ALSPs on average.

(Source: ACC Law Department Management Benchmarking Report)

4. Build a More Resilient Law Department With These Six Tips from Gartner

The pandemic has been one of the most significant disruptors in recent history. According to Gartner, persistent disruption can be expected over the next five years, leading to further risks. To counter these effects, legal departments must be able to provide timely guidance by evolving their departments.

How can they do this?

Gartner offers six shifts that will be critical in the coming years. These include assessing issues rapidly, prioritizing legal’s service portfolio by the impact of decisions, experimenting to deliver business outcomes and more. Conquering these attributes will lead to a more flexible and effective legal department.

(Source: Gartner)

5. Keep an Eye on Corporate Legal Spend

Nowadays, there is increasing pressure to run the legal department like a business – all while doing more with less and containing costs.

Enter the challenge of outside counsel invoices. The bills are often long, complex and can have differing or vague descriptions of charges. With limited resources, in-house professionals don’t always have time to dig deep into each line item.

How can you evaluate this facet of legal spend and ensure invoices are sticking to outside counsel guidelines?

PYMNTS.com explores viable and easily attainable solutions to counteract unnecessary overspending, offering an opportunity to support external legal service providers’ cash flow and optimize corporate’s legal spend.

(Source: Pymnts.com)

Bonus Resource for Legal Operations News: How CLM  and AI Pay Off for Corporate Legal, Sales and Procurement

This Quick Start Guide offers a bite-sized approach for exploring CLM and AI benefits and how they extend beyond in-house lawyers to sales and procurement. Learn how the technology can help you close deals faster, improve business outcomes and decrease risks. You can find the guide here.

To AI or Not to AI: The Great Debate on Legal AI Tools

Posted on June 29, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

From invoicing to contract review, you’ve probably heard how much legal AI tools can help you with routine, time-consuming tasks.

Is legal AI always the right answer, though? On June 9th, Onit hosted a webinar with Consilio and Buying Legal Council to answer precisely that question. Titled “To AI or Not to AI? The Big Debate Part II,” the webinar presented this challenge to two different teams:

There is no budget for additional headcount this year, even though your legal department is faced with the daunting task of repapering a massive number of contracts due to LIBOR, data privacy and other regulatory changes. Not to mention, you still have mounds of legal invoices to review. At the same time, strategic and risk management demands are higher than ever. What should be done? The GC has asked you to present a solution.

Team one, led by Onit, argued that AI tools for lawyers were the answer. Team two, led by Consilio, focused on outsourcing the work to an alternative legal service provider (ALSP).

Team Legal AI Tools

Team one’s main objective was to leverage AI to accomplish goals and improve operations. They argued that implementing legal AI tools internally would allow them to maintain control over their technology and use it to its greatest advantage.

The job of a general counsel at a multi-billion dollar global company is to increase the quality, consistency and velocity of every matter they touch while providing the team with resources that drive efficiencies throughout the enterprise. The question is which investments – whether humans or AI – will ultimately yield the returns you need down the road.

Team one aimed for standardization via legal AI tools to provide knowledge and data that would allow the organization to operate effectively, efficiently and consistently. They also dispelled lingering myths that legal AI tools are complicated to configure and implement. With Precedent, Onit’s AI platform, team one could configure their AI solutions within 15 minutes with no specific technical knowledge or training.

Team one noted, however, that the human/AI choice doesn’t have to be binary. Humans will always be a critical part of practicing law. But even superhuman employees need some help – specifically, they need legal AI. When you hire the best and the brightest and then allow them to use legal AI tools, you optimize your opportunities for success and retain your top talent. Institutional knowledge plus the processing power of AI is the winning combination.

Team ALSP

Team two presented a very different argument – that AI tools for lawyers are not always the answer because you’ll always need people. While legal AI tools have seen great advances, it’s not a sufficient replacement for humans. They also argued that it costs too much to train, takes too long to implement and demands too many resources for training.

Therefore, Team two advocated for outsourcing to ALSPs, rather than implementing legal AI in-house. ALSPs, they argued, save significant costs while offering faster start-up times, higher quality and more transparency.

In Team two’s experience, standing up a technology solution at a global company takes at least six months from the negotiation stage through implementation. If you’re lucky, you have your complete AI solution up and running in a year, which isn’t helpful for addressing your current, pressing needs. While implementing AI might certainly have long-term benefits, that wasn’t the challenge at hand. They believed going the AI route would delay ROI and sidetrack employees from their high-value work to focus on training the AI.

ALSPs, on the other hand, they argued, offer flexibility. An ALSP can serve as either a stop-gap or a more permanent part of a long-term, flexible model. You get instant access to top talent and expertise without investing in hiring or stretching your resources. Going the ALSP route still gives you access to legal AI tools – you just don’t have to train it yourself or invest in it. Those responsibilities fall to the ALSP.

Who Won The Great Debate Over Legal AI Tools?

Both teams presented worthy arguments pro and con legal AI tools for lawyers, but there can be only one winner. Listen to the debate to hear both sides’ full arguments and see which group the audience voted to win.

Many thanks to Consilio, an Elite partner in the Onit Strategic Alliances Program, and Buying Legal Council for participating in our second great debate!

This is the second debate event Onit has held. Explore our first debate, in which three teams argued different approaches to reduce outside counsel expenses. See the on-demand recording or read more about it.

The Onit Outlook Email Integration That Works Where Lawyers Work

Posted on June 24, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Email remains one of the critical tools in-house lawyers use every day, making email integration with legal technology mandatory.

Too often, though, email programs exist outside of the systems that lawyers use to handle the rest of their day-to-day work. The disconnect forces them to navigate back and forth between different software programs like matter management or contract lifecycle management, undoing valuable efficiency gained during the day.

Simply put, while it’s essential, email can bog down productivity.

Onit Outlook Connect: The Email Integration that Enhances Efficiency

As part of Onit’s goal to work where lawyers work, we’ve recently made enhancements to Onit Outlook Connect. Our Microsoft Outlook plug-in allows you to connect your email with all of your favorite products and solutions on Onit’s business process automation and artificial intelligence platforms.

Onit’s email integration allows you to file your emails directly into other systems, such as specific matters in your enterprise legal management software or contracts in your contract lifecycle management software. You get direct access to Onit from within Microsoft Outlook without having to navigate to different windows or launch new tools.

The plug-in appears in a panel on the right-hand side of your Outlook window. It gives you a quick view into your matters and most recent or favorite records, so you can easily see a snapshot of the essential information you need. From there, you can link directly into the record you need and do your work in Onit, all without having to jump to another panel or browser or re-authenticate your credentials.

The Onit email integration is the shortcut you need to handle your email and work in the same place

Simply choose the apps or tools you want to link to Outlook, and you’ll start seeing synopses of your work alongside your email every time you access it going forward. Get in, get out and focus on the work that matters most. Not only do you get to work where you’re already working, but you can keep everything organized in one place. Email linking and better organization mean better efficiency. Your email no longer has to be a hindrance to productivity.

At Onit, we’re always looking to create solutions that help lawyers do their best, most efficient work. Our ELM, CLM and other solutions are constantly innovated to provide process efficiency and work where our customers work.

Email is no different.

Reach out to your account manager today to learn more about how Onit Outlook Connect can change the way you use email in your day-to-day work. You can also schedule a demonstration or email [email protected].

A CLM Solution With None of the Risks and All the Rewards – Introducing Onit’s CLM 60-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Posted on June 22, 2021 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Contract Lifecycle Management

If you’re in corporate legal, you’re probably all too familiar with the concept of contract lifecycle management (CLM) by now, even if you haven’t implemented a CLM solution yet. CLM is one of the hottest technologies in the legal space today, but much of the talk is more hype than substance.

CLM is an area that’s ripe for digital transformation, but not all technologies actually deliver. When you’re choosing a CLM solution, ROI matters – and to prove how serious we are about that, we’re offering a 60-day money-back guarantee on Onit’s CLM software.

In this podcast, Matt DenOuden, Onit’s Senior Vice President of Global Sales, discusses the CLM money-back guarantee and how to get from hype to payoff.

CLM Tool ROI

Contracts are all about money, whether you’re selling your own goods and services or paying to secure the goods and services of others. That means that the efficiency of the contracting process is directly tied to revenue – the faster you can complete your contracts, the faster you get to making revenues or realizing the benefits of the money you’re spending.

A vast majority of legal teams (86%) say they need to modernize by using more technology, while 71% of in-house lawyers say they feel stuck doing low-value work, including manual contract work that requires multiple systems.

If you can find a way to reclaim that time and substantially shrink the overall contract cycle, you’re going to have a very tangible impact on your ROI. The trick is finding the right CLM solution.

CLM From Onit

The Onit CLM solution stands out from others in the space because we took the time to perfect it before we marketed it – we weren’t going to enter the marketplace until we had a market-leading product. We started our company 10 years ago by custom-building a CLM solution for a client and have continued to invest in and evolve our solution ever since.

Onit’s CLM software provides a strong workflow that’s configurable to your individual needs. We don’t just presume that the steps in your process for a certain contract type are going to be the same for the next. The flexibility in our tool allows you to always have transparency into your contracting process.

Our CLM AI also significantly accelerates contract review and extraction with:

  • ReviewAI, which reviews and redlines contracts such as NDAs, MSAs, SOWs and purchase agreements in less than two minutes
  • Smart Checklists in the ReviewAI Word Add-In, which turns playbook checks into intelligent, actionable and collaborative tasks.
  • ExtractAI, which extracts contract data and obtains usable data from executed, legacy and third-party paper contracts in less than five seconds.

We believe so strongly in our CLM technology that we’re giving you a 60-day money-back guarantee.

Try It Today

It takes 30.9 days for the average contract to be approved without CLM technology. Chances are, you and your business stakeholders would like to see that 30 days shortened significantly. With Onit CLM, you can make that happen.

Most software trial offers give you nothing more than a demo of the product. We’re offering a bona fide trial period at our own risk, backed by a commitment to return your money if you’re not happy after 60 days. Even with an average contract cycle of 30 days, you get 60 days for all your stakeholders to try our software, understand its value and realize the extent to which it can improve your ROI.

To start your money-back trial today, visit onit.com/60-day-guarantee or email us at [email protected].

Quick Start Guide: AI-Powered CLM Tool for Corporate Legal, Procurement and Sales

Posted on June 15, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

Corporate legal departments are increasingly relying on AI and other technologies like a CLM tool and automation to reduce costs, boost efficiency and better collaborate with other business units on contracts.

While many organizations have started to focus on how contract AI benefits the corporate legal department, the right CLM system offers advantages beyond legal to other contract stakeholders in your organization like sales and procurement. To explain how AI-powered CLM benefits all these different groups, we recently put together our handy Quick Start Guide: Contract AI: How it Pays Off for Corporate Legal, Sales and Procurement.

Here are just a few of the AI and CLM benefits covered in the Quick Start Guide.

Better Productivity and Insight for Legal with a CLM Tool and AI

A CLM tool powered by AI improves productivity by handling much of the scut work related to pre-signature contract review. AI manages the first-pass review, makes recommendations and delivers a risk profile. One study showed that new users of legal AI contract review software were immediately 51.5% more productive and 34% more efficient. When you multiply those gains across all the lawyers in an average midsized organization (55, according to this survey by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), it’s the equivalent of adding 28 lawyers to your team without actually increasing headcount.

AI-powered CLM tools are also transforming the legal ops role by standardizing and automating legal processes and creating a single point of truth for contract data. Contract AI empowers legal ops professionals to have better visibility into deals, keep drafting and negotiations on track, reduce risk and improve governance, accelerate turnaround time, cut costs and more.

Shorter Sales Cycles

Legal doesn’t have to serve as a black box for sales departments, where requests go in and responses come back with zero insight into progress or process. AI-powered CLM tools allow sales departments to break free from using disparate systems and instead operate in a single repository and workflow for all their contracts.

Inefficiency and lack of transparency are two of the biggest roadblocks for sales departments, and contract AI removes them. This allows sales professionals to close deals faster, automate contract requests, have real-time insights on active contracts, have access to the information they need when they need it, and engage in newfound levels of self-service.

Better Spend Management for Procurement

Much like it does for sales, the right AI-powered CLM tool serves as a single point of truth for all procurement activities across an enterprise. Procurement can’t function without contracts, and contract AI allows procurement to be flexible enough to tackle all the contract-related tasks essential to the procurement function.

Among other things, AI-powered CLM systems empower procurement professionals to improve business outcomes, decrease risk, manage spend against budget, have insight into contract negotiations and engage in self-service for routine contracts like NDAs.

For more insight into how AI and CLM are revolutionizing day-to-day business for legal, sales and procurement, you can download the complete Quick Start Guide for an AI-powered CLM tool here.

CLM AI: Does Your Contract Software Redline Contracts for You?

Posted on June 1, 2021 by - Artificial Intelligence, Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

When you ask today’s busy lawyers what they most need from legal AI, the answer is tools that help them be more productive like CLM AI contract redlining software.

While much of life might have gone on pause in the last year, contracts didn’t. In fact, lawyers have been handling more contracts than ever. For most companies, hiring more staff just to handle contracts isn’t a viable option. How, then, can lawyers speed up the contracting process and boost their productivity? The answer is having the right technology and features, like the features you can find in the right legal AI contract lifecycle management solution.

Take, for example, redlining contracts.

There are a lot of products and software that claim to help increase the efficiency of your contract review, but does your current contract AI redline your contracts for you? It should.

Contract Redlining Software to Help Protect Your Company From Risk

In a typical legal team, junior lawyers can be tasked with first-pass contract review, with the goal of flagging any issues that appear problematic or go against company standards. For example, if a third-party contract has a questionable clause, the junior attorney will usually circle the clause in red pen or mark it digitally and send it up the chain to senior lawyers for review. The senior lawyers would then review the clause and determine whether it’s something the company is willing to accept.

It doesn’t always go that smoothly, though.

Today’s busy lawyers are handling multiple tasks at once, while also juggling the demands of an increased workload and remote collaboration, meaning that errors can happen. If that clause is on page 45 of a 50-page contract and the lawyer has been reviewing it for several hours, it might not always get the attention it deserves due to fatigue or other priorities.

AI legal document review supports the contract review process and reduces the chance of human error. The contract redlining process is critical to protecting company interests. It’s also a fairly standard process, though it has historically been inefficient and time-consuming. All these factors make redlining a prime candidate for CLM AI.

What if there is a way to automate that first-pass review, better flag potential issues and get the whole job done in less than two minutes?

The Benefits of Redlining by CLM AI

Tapping into legal contract AI with automated redlining software is an incredible advantage when it comes to keeping up with increasing contract demands. It also creates a legitimate solution for reducing attorneys’ low-value, busy work.

Contract AI redlining isn’t only a tool that’s useful for lawyers – it’s also a great way to allow other business units, like sales or procurement, to engage in self-service. These other departments touch the company’s contracts all the time, but they typically have to wait in line to have their contracts reviewed by legal when they come in.

With ReviewAI contract management, business users can run an AI-powered redline in less than two minutes, spot potential issues right away, determine if there are problems to solve and then automatically escalate critical issues to legal as necessary. The redlining provided by CLM AI essentially allows business users to self-service the review of common contracts such as NDAs.

As with any contract AI, automating the redlining process isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s helping them be better at their jobs. It even performs a critical training function for junior lawyers and new legal team members. Company playbooks are based on decades of institutional knowledge. As junior lawyers see the AI data extraction results the software produces, they learn the playbook, essentially learning from the company’s best and brightest.

ReviewAI contract management from Onit redlines and automates your contract review, applying your playbook to find the things humans might miss and looking for any crucial terms that are missing. CLM AI takes less than two minutes, speeds up contract review by up to 70% and increases productivity by more than 50%.

Schedule an Onit demo today to learn more.